Vice President Kamala Harris is visiting the southern border in the critical swing state of Arizona, looking to flip the script on immigration.
Her visit coincides with another round of baseless claims from former President Trump about Haitian immigrants.
And the candidates' foreign policy differences were on stark display this week.
Joining me tonight to discuss this and more, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Wendy Benjaminson is a senior editor for Bloomberg News, Adam Harris, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and Heidi Przybyla, Politico's National Investigative Correspondent.
Thank you to all for being here tonight.
Peter, I want to start with you.
We're going to get to immigration, but we're less than six weeks out from Election Day.
Just give us a quick state of the race right now.
PETER BAKER, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Well, if you went to sleep last week and you're waking up now, it's pretty close to where it was last week.
We are in a period of the campaign where the numbers are inching up incrementally.
Small numbers are being examined and given larger meaning, perhaps than they have.
But Harris is building a slight but meaningful edge.
That's in the national polls.
In the state polls that matter, the seven states that we all really care about, it really is about as tight as a tick.
And some of my colleagues at the Times this week did something really interesting.
They tried to apply a filter, looking at how polls have gotten things off in the past, right?
So, if you look at the polls in those seven battleground states, and we assume that the polls are off in the way that they were in 2020, when Trump's support was underestimated, Trump wins all seven.
If you assume that we're off by the way we were in 2022, when Democrats were underestimated, Harris wins six of the seven.
So, tell me what we're supposed to make of that.
We don't know.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: It's a margin of error.
What are we supposed to make of that?
Wendy, Bloomberg has its own poll out this week.
What stood out to you from that?
WENDY BENJAMINSON, Deputy Managing Director, Bloomberg News: Well, a lot of things stood out to me.
First of all, it did exactly what Peter said that it should do, which showed a deadlocked, tight race between Harris and Trump.
She is within the margin of error above him in our poll in all seven states, but just barely, and dead even in Georgia.
So, it absolutely could go either way.
But what struck me as even more interesting than that was this idea of where Kamala Harris is gaining ground that Joe Biden could not.
She is now only two points -- or excuse me, four points behind Trump, gaining two points.
When we asked voters, who do you trust more to steer the U.S. economy?
Now, it's only a four-point difference between her and Trump.
Just last month, it was six, and when Joe Biden was running, it was far greater than that.
She is also gaining ground with voters on who do you trust to steer, to help the middle class.
And her policy proposals, when we offered a blind taste test, of here's some policy proposals that are out there, which ones do you like?
Her's were far more popular than his except for ending the federal tax on Social Security.
That was the most popular policy position.
But it shows that she is gaining ground.
The one place that is still really hard for her is the issue of immigration, where she is 14 points behind Donald Trump on trust on immigration.
And that really struck me partly because, given Trump's rhetoric, given Trump's attitude toward immigrants, what it says about how swing state voters feel about new arrivals to the country.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Well, you gave me the perfect segue, because, Adam, we do want to talk about Arizona, which is where the vice president is right now.
And in a New York Times poll of Arizona voters, it found that Harris is behind Trump by five points.
When voters were asked if the election were today, who would you vote for, and they said 50 percent would vote for Donald Trump, 45 percent would vote for the vice president.
So, Adam, right now, she's attempting to flip the script on immigration there and really challenge Donald Trump.
Are voters responding to this?
ADAM HARRIS, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: Yes, well, you know, it's interesting because over the last several months, we've actually seen her make up some ground that Joe Biden had already lost on immigration, right?
There was a CNN poll back in July that had her -- that had Joe Biden somewhere around 22 points behind Donald Trump on immigration.
Now, she's somewhere around eight in that same CNN poll.
So, what the Harris campaign sees is an opportunity to sort of be a little bit more aggressive, right?
She's not necessarily defining her own immigration policy.
There are a couple of differences between her policy and Joe Biden's policy.
I know that she wants to change some of the conditions for citing asylum restrictions or for changing the asylum restrictions.
But, effectively, they see that there is a possibility for an end there, where the former president, right, he's sort of running on a policy of fear when you think about immigration, right, things where him and J.D.
Vance will say that, you know, it's a million migrants are coming across the border each month when, you know, data shows that it's never been more than 200,000 a month, right?
So, it's really a sort of campaign of fear, policy of fear, and there's a ceiling to that, where the Harris campaign thinks that there's a floor, and she can only go up on her immigration policies.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: And border crossings are down right now as well.
Heidi, on the Republican side, despite repeated debunking, despite the governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine saying -- telling members of his party to stop spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in an Ohio town, eating pets, a Republican congressman this week, Clay Higgins of Louisiana, tweeted this.
He said that Haitians are wild, speaking about those Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets, voodoo, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, that Haitians are slapstick gangsters, and that all of these thugs need to get out of the country by January 20th.
What does this say about the state of the GOP?
HEIDI PRZYBYLA, National Investigative Correspondent, POLITICO: But what is so I'm so pernicious about this is that many in the Republican Party constantly say we are for legal immigration.
We're not anti-immigrant.
Well, this is blatantly anti-immigrant because these Haitian workers are here legally fulfilling jobs that are needed.
But there are no consequences in the party right now for comments like this.
Yes, he was told to pull it back.
But, overall, we're in a climate now of unprecedented political violence.
We haven't seen something like this since the 1970s.
And it's worse by several metrics.
Because in the 70s, we were talking about property damage, not assaults on individuals.
We didn't have like the shootings of black shoppers in supermarkets in Buffalo.
We didn't have neighbors shooting each other because they thought they were of the opposite political party, which did happen last year in Ohio.
So, right now, the whole narrative about political violence though, has been driven by Trump saying, well, I've been the target of assassination attempts.
But what the data shows is that a lot of the political violence is actually taking place on American people, on the American citizens, on election officials, the threats against election officials.
But none of that is resonating within the GOP.
They're not disciplining their own.
And so there are no consequences, and comments like this just continue to be made.
WENDY BENJAMINSON: And, in fact, if I may, just for a minute, Heidi, you made a very good point about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield.
They are actually reviving the economy there.
The population had gotten very old.
Young people were leaving this town as soon as they could, not filling all those jobs.
Well, here come the Haitians on temporary protected status from Haiti because of, I guess, a coup or natural disaster.
And they're taking the jobs.
HEIDI PRZYBYLA: And they're actually paying Social Security taxes, but can't collect on the benefits, just to put a bow on it.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Yes.
Adam, go ahead.
ADAM HARRIS: Well, I would say and it's also, you know, squarely within that sort of GOP strategy of sort of vilifying the supposed other, right?
It's just sort of it's a sort of dehumanization.
One of the lines from that tweet that really stuck out to me was, you know, when there was -- you know, if they don't feel all sophisticated, right, and it's hard to hear that and not think of, you know, people calling, you know, black people uppity, right, supposing that they think that they have more rights than they should have.
And as you were saying, right, these are Americans or these are migrants.
PETER BAKER: I was going to say, it's striking how -- I'm sorry, but it's striking to go back and watch Trump rallies in the last few months, which I've been doing lately for a story.
And if you watch rally after rally after rally after rally, it is really -- it's almost like a single issue campaign for him, right?
The rally is border, border, border, inflation, crime, border, border, border, Kamala is a communist, border, border, border.
He comes back to it again and again and again.
Because that's where his energy is and that's what he thinks he won in 2016, build the wall.
It was the accidental slogan.
He didn't know it was going to become popular.
As soon as he saw it was popular, he grasped onto it like a lifeline.
And from his point of view, it worked.
So, now he's trying it again eight years later.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: Is it just about winning though, Wendy?
Because, I mean, tweets like Higgins' don't happen in a vacuum.
And as Peter says, this is what Trump's entire campaign is about.
But he and Vance aren't just saying Haitian immigrants are eating pets.
He's also saying that non-citizens are voting in hordes.
He's also saying that migrants are poisoning the blood of the country.
Why is he talking this way about immigration?
WENDY BENJAMINSON: Well, I assume it is, part of it is winning, but I think also part of it is that sort of demonization of the other, as you said, Adam, is also building the popular support for the deportations that he wants to carry out for incredibly tough draconian immigration policies that he wants to put in.
And if you can make America angry about it and not see these as people in need who came, just like all of our ancestors did, then that is -- then he can shove them out of the country.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: And, Heidi, we were just in Michigan where a bunch of election officials were meeting.
I mean, some of this rhetoric seems like it's also just an attempt to lay the foundation to say that the 2024 election is being stolen by non-citizens?
HEIDI PRZYBYLA: Well, yes.
In 2020, there were conspiracy theories in very specific states, like Michigan, that ballots were being harvested and dumped and taken in suitcases.
And now the predicate is being laid that illegal immigrants, undocumented immigrants are voting, and you're seeing this in numerous states and the elections officials that we talked to said, use the media, play a really vital role in this.
Because we know in the disinformation spin cycle that when you can pre-bunk information and say, hey, listener, hey, viewer, this is what you are going to be told, it is false.
let me repeat that.
But this is what you're going to be told and here's the truth, that the more that we can get that out and tell them that this is actually pre-planned and being hatched right now, that the more effective it might be at keeping some of the civil unrest that, frankly, those elections officials are worried about because they told us, look, we got it, okay, there are no election deniers that won in these states.
We're going to be able to administer a very fair and efficient election.
What we're worried about is the aftermath and the disinformation and the people who believe the lies and what they might do.
WENDY BENJAMINSON: And another good point, though, is that they are -- the new thing in this cycle that we didn't see in '20 or we didn't see in '16 was this notion that, yes, I'm lying.
Sure, I am lying.
J.D.
Vance says he knows the Springfield, Ohio, story about Haitians eating pets isn't true.
But he says he wanted to get our attention on -- the media's attention on the issue of immigration.
But it sort of backfired and it became an issue about them spouting disinformation.
But that's the thing is that now it is okay to lie, it is okay to admit that you're lying, and still campaign on that.
It's really startling.
LAURA BARRON-LOPEZ: And at rallies, a lot of the voters believe those conspiracy.
